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Britain's political leadership, for the first time in decades, is well placed to take a reasoned, strategic approach to the long-term development of science and innovation. But watch out for resurgent bureaucracy.
Proponents call it a miracle. Detractors call it smoke and mirrors. Will the System of Rice Intensification feed the hungry third world or needlessly divert farmers from tried and true techniques? Christopher Surridge investigates.
Smell is arguably the most evocative and mysterious of our senses. But thanks to advances in our understanding of the cells that detect odour, its secrets should now start to be revealed. Carina Dennis sniffs around.
A molecular difference in the jaw muscles of human and non-human primates has tantalizing echoes in the fossil record. Was this divergence a central event in the evolution of the skull of modern hominids?
Crystallized brown sugar is quite miraculous: it takes just a few ‘seeds’ in the crystallization process to trigger the formation of many times more crystals. Now we are starting to understand why.
Genetic screens are powerful tools for identifying the genes involved in specific biological processes. At last, RNA interference makes large-scale screens possible in mammalian cells.
Learning from experience is hard, and predicting how well what we have learned will serve us in the future is even harder. The most useful lessons turn out to be those that are insensitive to small changes in our experience.
The results of experiments conducted under the extreme temperature and pressure conditions of Earth's lower mantle suggest that, at these depths, low oxygen content is no barrier to iron oxidation.
Molecular profiling — the comprehensive analysis of genes, RNAs and proteins — is having a radical effect on our understanding of cancer. The next step is to convert these findings into better diagnosis and treatment.
Noise limits the efficiency of information transfer. But correlations of the intervals between signal pulses can reduce low-frequency noise and thereby increase the transfer of information.
